Under the Dragon (2 page)

I CLOSED MY EYES and took a deep breath.

Jasmine. She had wound a white string of fresh blossoms into her hair and let it brush against the copper-brown nape of her neck. I lowered my head and smelt anise. Its sweet scent stirred a memory of two lovers draped around one another in hazy exhaustion. A decade before, beside Kandawgyi Lake I had seen them reading the future in each other’s palms, then watched a sandal slip off the girl’s tanned foot to reveal the pale brush of whiteness left by a thong.

I took another breath, and the whiff of coffee came back to me. The unhurried widow had drunk it through a straw, perching on a tiny stool, balancing with tidy grace a brick’s height above the broken pavement. Her modest
longyi
was tucked and folded around her limbs.

I inhaled again, and the trapped aromas recalled the taste of
mohinga
and caraway, a shock of fiery spices, the recollection of light morning laughter. In my mind I heard the gurgle of wood-pigeons and listened to the rustle of palm leaves in the breeze. I remembered water vendors’ plastic cups tap-tapping against their aluminium buckets like the clip-clop of horses’ hooves. I summoned back the image of a mother rocking her naked infant to sleep.

Then I took a last, long breath. Now the musty bamboo weave exuded the feral reek of fear. My nose filled with the stink of cordite. I pictured soldiers falling into rank to shoot nurses outside Rangoon General Hospital. I heard bones breaking and women choking as their heads were forced under Inya’s waters. I saw the rush of spray from fire-engine hoses clean away the pools of blood.

The memories scorched my senses. I jerked my head away from the old basket. Outside the cold winter rain beat on grimy windows and the sounds of London rose up to return me to the neon-lit storeroom.

My first encounter with Burma had happened by mistake. It was ten years since a long flight from Heathrow had dumped me, exhausted and disorientated, in the soulless chaos of Bangkok airport. I had rushed headlong and bleary-eyed to make a tight connection to Hong Kong and managed to find the departure gate with only minutes to spare. I was the last passenger to board the aircraft. The doors closed. The engines started. I slumped into my seat and promptly fell asleep. Fifty minutes later I awoke not at modern Kai Tak, with electrum skyscrapers gleaming across Hong Kong Harbour, but to the sight of a young woman squatting at the edge of the runway breaking stones by hand. A shirtless, limping man pulled a single baggage cart past a scruffy terminal building. The dilapidated sign behind them read ‘We come R goon’. The missing wooden letters lay where they had fallen in the dust. I had caught the wrong aircraft, and couldn’t get a flight out of Rangoon for a week.

I have no family link with Burma. No distant relative ever toured the country. I was not weaned on reminiscences of tea plantations or colonial stories about cheeky, teak-skinned elephant boys. But for ten years the memory of that chance visit haunted me. In those seven days the Burmese cast a spell over me, winding themselves into my heart, and leaving behind an ache, a gnawing hunger. A few remarkable women and men dropped into my life. All of them – once away from the ubiquitous police informers – cast aside their gentle, reserved natures to share their stories with me. Time did not loosen or unravel the ties of emotion. Instead they had continued to grip me, as did the untiring, heroic example of Aung San Suu Kyi, leader of the democratic opposition and a prisoner of conscience for much of the last decade. The obsession led me to question why a distant country with which I had no connection had so affected me. It made me wonder what kindnesses hold us, cruelties enslave us, love devotes us to a person, people or place. To me Burma was a paradox, a land of selfless generosity and sinister greed stitched together by love and fear. Its people persevered while accepting life’s impermanence, its rulers deified their former leader yet imprisoned his daughter. To try to understand it, I resolved to go back to the country.

I began my return journey by sniffing at a basket in east London. That morning Katrin and I had chased the number 22 bus from the Museum of Mankind, through a gusty January downpour, along Piccadilly. At Swallow Street our umbrella had torn, shredding itself into a tangle of wild tendrils, and a black cab had lifted a gush of water over our legs. The bus had paused at the lights and we scrambled on board, collapsing into a heap of dripping clothing and damp notes.

Our destination lay at the end of its route. Lurking on a forgotten corner of an oily East End street, the brick warehouse appeared as unremarkable as its neighbours. Its innocuous nameplate, BM Enterprises, suggested that it housed a firm of fabric importers or motor-part merchants. No hint was given of the building’s true contents. Stacked within, on metal shelves and in boxes, many of them unopened for decades, were not bolts of Chinese cotton or job lots of brake pads, but the treasures of the British Museum’s ethnographic collection. For over four centuries British travellers had returned home from Zululand, Bora Bora and the headwaters of the Saskatchewan with sea chests and steamer trunks filled with indigenous artefacts. At first the prizes had adorned the rectories of Gloucestershire and the mantelpieces of Belgravia. But in time their novelty had worn off. Their owners had died or grown tired of dusting the fiddly objects, and the spoils of Empire had found their way to the Museum. There, in the hidden corner of Dalston off the Kingsland Road, African death masks were stored alongside Micronesian penis shields, quivers of Eskimo sealing spears poked at Aboriginal didgeridoos and birch-bark canoes moored beside Burmese baskets.

In the neon-lit storeroom we almost overlooked Item 1950. As 3.2.5. Among many conspicuous treasures, it seemed to offer little of interest. The listing in the catalogue stated simply, ‘Basket with lid; as women use for market.’ It had been donated to the museum by the widow of a British civil servant. She had probably found it while cleaning out the attic. But instead of turning the page to the rattan cricket cages and hunter’s powder horn pouch inset with beetle wings, I hesitated over the entry. The name of the civil servant had caught my eye. It suggested that this basket might be something out of the ordinary.

James George Scott was a bearish man with eyes full of laughter. I have a photograph of him, unshaven, unkempt, smiling outside a canvas tent on the road to Kengtung. In a camera’s shutter-snap his whole life seems to be encapsulated, an enthusiastic adventurer ready to toss aside his pith helmet, roll up his sleeves and get down to the business of empire-building. He lived in Burma for more than thirty years in the late nineteenth century, serving as Frontier Officer, helping to map the Siamese border and receiving a knighthood for his contribution to the establishment of British rule in the Shan States. Yet his enduring legacy is not as a distinguished superintendent, aloof and busy with colonial administration, but rather in his books. Scott is probably the only Western writer to have captured the spirit of Burmese society. In his best-known book,
The Burman: His Life and Notions
, he wrote with insight, without condescension or romanticism, at a time when the country’s old ways were changing for ever. His work recorded the life and beliefs of a vanishing age: will a Sunday-born man marry well a woman born on a Wednesday? To bring luck, should a house be built on male, female or neuter foundation posts? He asked if a nation which has a voluminous history, almost all of which is pure romance, can be happy. It seemed unlikely that after spending three decades away from Britain this erudite observer would bother to bring home anything mundane.

Katrin waited with me while Scott’s basket was brought down from the shelves. We had been married for four years and, much to the despair of her parents, remained of no fixed abode. Her mother tried her best to tempt us into home ownership, clipping out property ads from the local paper and promising us enticing pieces of good furniture. Her father counselled me on rising property values. But instead of being sensible and investing in bricks-and-mortar we chose to look after the houses of absent friends, straining our over-laden Escort estate over the Alps, around the Brecon Beacons or into the Highlands every six months or so. We had no jobs to tie us to offices, no children needing to be dropped off at school. Our possessions were scattered from Tooting to Toronto. Our responsibility was only to ourselves, and our families and friends. The travelling life suited us, even if most of our wedding presents remained wrapped up and my papers were in a state of permanent disarray, for it gave us the luxury of time together. We both worked from home, or at least from the place where our suitcases fell open. My pad of paper balanced on my lap, while on hers Katrin wove dyed cane. I snapped pencil leads as she snipped the tips of her withies. She wielded seccateurs where I tried to cut adverbs. At the end of a good day I might have a single black-and-white typed sheet. Katrin would have produced two or three shapely objects of splendid texture and tone. She was happiest in a world of form and colour. She was a basket-maker.

When Scott’s treasure was set on the table Katrin was not disappointed. I was delighted. It was shaped like a woman’s torso, a full firm chest tapering down to an elegant waist, and my first instinct was to take it into my arms. The basket’s busty body was crafted in split bamboo, its dignified posture moulded with gentle curves. Its plaited skin was patterned with precision and the narrow, shaped elements woven into a collar by sensitive hands.

I removed its fitted lid and smelt jasmine and anise, remembered coffee served with lime and the shock of fiery spices. I imagined Scott seeing the basket a century before, swinging by its once-green carrying strap from a young woman’s shoulder, resting against her hip, being filled with tender-stew-leaves and fragrant sticky rice. It was feminine and graceful, small-boned and beautiful.

Basketry was probably man’s earliest invention. Pottery came later, when woven vessels were lined with clay as protection from cooking coals and hot food. The craft links us to our beginnings and confirms our longing for organisation. In gathering and carrying, trapping or storing, our practical nature has always sought to contain, to try to order life’s chaotic tumble of events. A basket weaves together disordered strands to create a new form, becoming a vessel that guards against disarray and uncertainty. A lover’s embrace fulfils the same longing for completeness. Limbs entwine like a basket-maker’s fronds. Man is stitched to woman, neighbour to neighbourhood, citizen to country, our lives becoming the interlocking strands that together contain and are contained. The individual elements are plaited over and under, twisted and lashed to form a border, making receptacles to enclose a measure of rice, a young family or a whole nation. But the ties that bind also separate. A lover’s caress and the bonding of peoples both enfold and exclude. A basket is separated from all but itself. And any weave, if uneven, will exert a pressure that in time frays the edges, unravels the lacing and loosens the bands until the basket comes undone and chaos is restored.

‘It’s beautiful,’ said Katrin, admiring the craftsmanship with a professional eye. ‘And so elaborate. But how would it ever carry a day’s shopping?’

The basket did seem too small for a trip to the market, but my need for it wasn’t domestic. ‘I want one,’ I told her.

‘It’s probably a hundred years old,’ she said, her realism trying to keep in check my more excessive fancies. ‘And the design will have changed. No one will have the time to do detailed work like this any more. We don’t even know where Scott found it.’

I looked at the museum’s label. It revealed no details of the place of origin. There was no clue either as to the identity of its makers. Although Scott had spent most of his days in the north of Burma, he had travelled so widely that it could have been discovered in any corner of the country.

‘The design may not have changed,’ I said, my optimism getting the better of me. I hoped that Burma’s isolation might have protected its traditions from the worst effects of consumerism’s advance.

Burma had been a kingdom – or at least a succession of alternately glorious and anarchic monarchies – for a thousand years, until the British annexed the country in 1885 and placed it under the Raj. After the Second World War it had enjoyed a brief period of independence and democracy before falling under a repressive military government in 1962. For more than twenty-five years its borders were sealed and its people isolated in a kind of world apart, as the new regime tried to eliminate its opponents and waged a barbaric civil war against ethnic minorities. Then in 1988, the year after my accidental visit, the dictators had put down a popular uprising by killing more than five thousand people. The leaders of the democratic movement who had survived were arrested. But with the temporary release of Aung San Suu Kyi in 1995, the generals had seemed to turn over a new leaf. At least, they were anxious to promote the impression of wanting their country to be united by a force other than fear.

‘It’s certainly a working basket,’ said Katrin, considering its elaborate corners. ‘Decoration would have depended on the availability of materials and the plentifulness of food. This would have been made in a good year.’

‘So these could still be in use today,’ I persisted. ‘Look, this has to be a functional feature,’ I added, pointing out the inner shell of broad plaited bamboo that protected the outer body’s delicate weave.

We considered the statuesque form, the labour of a gifted, anonymous maker. Katrin had a refined sense of adventure, the courage of curiosity tempered by the desire for a long, fruitful life. She knew that a family couldn’t be raised in the back of a Ford Escort but, until that time came, she was eager to travel. She also sensed that the basket provided the strand that I needed to follow.

‘It’s a big country,’ Katrin said. Burma is larger than France. ‘Where would we start?’

I took another long sniff of the basket. Again its pungent aromas carried me half a world away. I smelt durian and jack-fruit, tasted sweet milky tea, saw boy soldiers in sneaker boots toy with their rifles. Pagoda bells tinkled in my memory and I remembered the warmth of a friend’s hand. In all my travels no country had touched me so unexpectedly. It seemed to me that the search for a basket like Scott’s would really be an attempt to understand the forces that weave people together. I wanted to try to fathom the needs and fancies, mysteries and curiosities that move the heart. I also needed to see if the Burmese had remained good-natured and quiescent through the last decade of brutal political suppression.